Containing our Gardening Enthusiasms

A few days of warm weather has made many things leap ahead in our gardens, and in my greenhouse. I spent part of Friday up my containers, most of which are filled with a variety of annual flowering and foliage plants. I use containers as portable gardens once the risk of frost is past, moving them around the yard to where I want a burst of colour. My Halifax Herald column today is about container plantings, and I didn't have a lot of room to provide a lot of plant examples, so I've added some here for people to try.

One of my most beloved annuals for containers is the African daisies, of which there are a number of different genera. The Osteospermums or osteos are among the most common, and are vigourous, longflowering container stars. The top photo includes a white variety, while this one is called 'Summertime Blueberry.'

When the weather gets tough, the tough go plant hunting!

It started out innocently enough, as these things often do. I blame it totally on the weather.

After a highly productive early morning writing plant profiles and finishing up a presentation I'll be doing soon, I thought I might go outside and work. Well. I knew it was windy, but when I went outside and got blown halfway across the yard, I got enormously peeved at the universe. I knew there'd be no working outside, so I got thinking about a wonderful plant I spied a couple of weeks ago at Briar Patch Farm and Nursery in Berwick. It's a new annual euphorbia along the lines of the awesome 'Diamond Frost'; this one has more of a pink tinge and larger flowers, and is called 'Breathless Blush'. I figure the weather has moderated enough that I should go pick it up, along with a few other things, and then I can work in the greenhouse, planting my containers. So I headed off down the highway...


...but I didn't go to ONLY Briar Patch. I managed to hit four nurseries, two of which have websites: Briar Patch, and denHaan's, down in Middleton. Because you see, I thought I'd go visit denHaan's, see what they have for annuals, then go have tea with my friend Terri at her Telegraph Tea Room in neighbouring Nictaux.


At den Hann's, I managed to have 4 small fall asters, a burgundy flowered sanguisorba, a huge, purple-belled gloxinia for my office, and several annuals follow me out to the car. One of the annuals is this pink Pentas, a great butterfly magnet.


In Centreville, I had to go in to Gerry Frail's nursery (no website) and collect a few other container plants, including the white osteo in the second photo, 'Osteo Soprano Vanilla'. Though I love some of the newer colours of osteos, I always need a white one or two, and I haven't had one of the spoon-petalled types for a while.


I had this cuphea, called 'Totally Tempted' a couple of years ago. Although it's kind of messy when its flowers finish, I found it a huge hummingbird magnet, so I decided to get another one this year to put in one of the hanging baskets. I picked this up at a small family greenhouse in Aylesford called Marlene's. A miniature astilbe called 'Sprite', which I can't wait to plant, pleaded with me to give it a good home. Well, you know when plants plead with you, you have to comply.

Oh, let's see, what else did I collect? At Briar Patch, a really fine specimen of Amsonia 'Blue Ice'; I have the regular A. tabernaemontana, which has been a tried and true performer for nearly a decade. I did have a 'Blue Ice' a couple of years ago, but...ahem...I forgot where I planted it and I don't know if it went to sleep or if I weeded it thinking it was something else or what happened to it. Have I mentioned that we have a lot of garden beds, and that sometimes things do go astray?


So then I went to Terri's place, the perfect way to wrap up a highly satisfactory break from working. Terri and her husband James moved here from England several years ago, and opened this tea room as part of their new life here. At one time, Terri worked at Heligan and the Eden Project back in the UK, so she's a real plantswoman and a pleasure to talk with. And I'm now hopelessly hooked on what she calls a Ploughman's lunch. I'd read about this for many years, but never had it before. Maybe it was the homemade wholegrain rolls. Or the white Stilton with pears blended into it. Or the delectable chocolate mint herbal tea that I had with it. Or just all of the above, plus good conversation. It was altogether dandy, and much better than sitting home cussing at the wind. I did enough of that when I got back and had to unload everything into the greenhouse!

By the time you read this, I'll be on my way to Bible Hill to give a talk, but first I'll be flying to Antigonish to pick up some plants from Bill and Sharon at The Willow Garden. And then detouring to Lloyd Mapplebeck's Hillendale Perennials to drop off some plants I promised him. Am leaving Longsuffering Spouse at home because...he takes up too much room in the car, and there has to be room for plants.

Wordless Wednesday: "Days of Future Past"...Summer will come again

Bright Colours to Chase the Fog

While a significant number of garden bloggers are enjoying themselves in Chicago at the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling, some of us had to stay behind and tend to real life. Like finishing assignments and trying to make head and tail of our gardens. Nature has a sense of humour, however, so she decided to roll the fog in, and it's just too wet for my temperamental bones to be out scrubbing around in the yard. I did, however, take my camera for a little walk and catch some bright colours to cheer myself with.
While I like pastels in other people's gardens, there aren't a whole lot here for a very good reason. The fog washes out such colours and makes them look drab. I like real jewel tones for the most part, and also like to punch things up with colourful foliage. These two cranesbills are Espresso and Springtime; I have to move Espresso because it has a much lower and less-exuberant growth habit than Springtime, which is a Geranium phaeum cultivar.

I'm always gushing about lantanas, and this one is no exception: Landmark Citrus. It's still in my greenhouse because it's planted with some new cultivars that came to me from Proven Winners, and I want them to get well established before I introduce them to Scotts Bay fog. 

Last year, I got my greedy little hands on several new Geum cultivars. I know that often geums are short-lived perennials, at least in my garden, but I had to have these two. This beauty is called 'Mango Lassy', and it's unfortunate that I finished my bottle of mango nectar last night because I have a sudden craving, you know? 

Longsuffering spouse thought it looked a bit like a poppy, but agreed with me that it's a beautiful thing. I just wished they flowered a lot longer than they do. 

The geums and cranesbills are near my fabulous copper beech, still a modest sized sapling but growing well and with gorgeous, gorgeous foliage. 

Snerk. I should have 'David' phlox (one of my favourite plants, even though it's pastel) planted beside this geum and call it my rockstar planting. Because this geum is called 'Cooky'. Heh. 

The double-flowered grape hyacinths are coming out and they look especially striking against the brilliant foliage of 'Aztec Gold' veronica. 

The front garden is forging ahead quite happily, although there's not a huge amount in bloom right now other than the containers I've put outside already. in the right-centre foreground is a new tansy I got last week, 'Isla Gold'. I've bought it just for the foliage, which I think is lovely, and will go well near something with purple foliage like Sambucus 'Black Lace'. 

Many of the containers are still in the greenhouse, but I put these outside last week just to see how they'll do. We're going to track them every week or ten days or so and see how they're growing. 

And I haven't decided where to plant this glorious 'Autumn Brilliance' dryopteris fern yet, but I got very excited when I found it last week at Briar Patch in Berwick. Probably it'll go out in the shade garden, and I'm optimistic that it will do well here. The literature says it keeps changing its colours throughout the season. We'll keep an eye on it and see how it does, but it's definitely a thing of beauty. 

Love Song to Annuals

A couple of weeks ago I did several posts looking at plants we love to not so much love, and included a few annuals on my list of plants I don't particularly want in my garden. They're fine and wonderful and just not my thing. Now it's time to look at some that I am very fond of. 
We'll start with lantana. It's a strange plant; I know it's perennial in warmer parts of the world, and even invasive and a nuisance in some areas. Here, it's a tender annual, flinching at the first sign of cold weather, pouting and dying when frost whispers around the containers. But I adore it. It's an important plant for pollinators, and the flowers are just SO cool with their varying shades in each flowerhead of florets. This one is called 'Sunrise Rose'. It's well named, wouldn't you say?

Invariably I lose labels and names of annuals despite the best of intentions. These, for the record, are all annuals that come in individual pots, higher priced than the flats of grown from seed plants. I use them exclusively in containers around our gardens and yard, and tend towards bright, strong colours. 

This will grow from seed, although this particular strain is a hybrid, either 'Wildcat Blue' or 'Skylover.' The plant is Anagallis, or blue pimpernel, or Poor Man's Weatherglass; I love it for its cobalt blue flowers, and its funky habit of closing up its flowers when the weather gets cloudy. 

Osteospermums are definitely one of my favourites. This is one of the softer coloured ones, and I tend usually towards the richer ones, but I like its unique clean form. And osteos are interesting because they are fussy in the spring, but once they get established, they're so tough and flower until a hard frost or snow takes them out. 

Ahem. This is a fabulous verbena. It didn't need cossetting and deadheading to keep it flowering until the cold weather sent me out to dump the last of the containers. I should have taken a cutting, because not only do I not know its name...I have NO idea where I got it. Sigh. Note to self. Go back to Gardening Gone Wild and study the GBDWorkshop on labels and records....

Pansies make me smile. I don't care if they're common, or slug bait, or whatever else some dismiss them with. They are simply beautifully happy flowers, and this antique shades collection are among my favourites. 

I never used to grow ageratum at all. Then the plant breeders got interesting with colour changing and came up with some deep rose and even wine coloured varieties. Add that to the fact that pollinators love them, and they've taken a place in my container plantings. 

Lobelias can be problematic because they tend to melt down in hot weather. However, there have been several heat-resistant varieties recently, including the Laguna and Technoheat series, and they perform very well for me all season long. 

Torenias will take some shade, I've found in recent years, providing they don't get too wet. This little darling is called 'Lovely Yellow'. And isn't she wellnamed? 

Nemesia is easy to grow from seed, but there are some beautiful new cultivar series that I really, really like. This is called Opal Innocence, and even though it's more pastel than most of my choices, it's so striking I had to have it. As an added bonus, it has a wonderful scent, sort of like baby-powder but not cloying. I hope to see it around this spring. 

And this is a bit of an acquiescence to Anna and her love of petunias. It's a Callie, or actually it's a super-callie, a beefed up cross between callies and petunias. This one is called 'Terra Cotta' and it's a definite favourite because the hummingbirds love it. That's always good enough for me!

All-star annuals for Containers

So we've selected our containers, and prepared our soil, and we know where we want to put our containers (maybe). Now comes the fun part: picking out the plants. I happen to really, really enjoy selecting annuals for containers, and yes, I'm going to focus on annuals because that's what I primarily use. I do have one concrete trough of alpines, but I also have lots of room around our place for perennials, shrubs, trees, etc, and I like doing containers of annuals because I can change them up with ease, they flower their little heads off or have sparkling foliage, and I don't feel guilty consigning them to the compost heap at season's end.

You can pick plants with flower colours that match your container colours, or that contrast, whatever suits your tastes. I do some of each, naturally. This big mosaic pot was custom built for me by a local artisan, and because its colours are so striking, I tend to choose annuals with flowers that more or less match; blues, orange, greens, a bit of purple. In this caseI used a brilliant orange gerbera, purple heliotrope, blue lobelia (probably from the Techno heat series, which last really well in our garden even during the heat that we do get in high summer)and a callibrachoa, possibly 'Terra Cotta' or 'Purple Sunrise.


For those who love blue, and who are frustrated by lobelias, try anagallis. It comes easily from seed, or you can purchase the various cultivars such as 'Skylover' or 'Wildcat Blue' and it works reasonably well in a container. I normally shear mine back when I first get them as they do get leggy in a nursery setting, and they tangle their stems with other plants nearby. But anything this blue can be naughty if it wants--all is forgiven when it flowers.


This African daisy is a Venidium, sometimes called Venidio, that I wouldn't be without. I find them in red, rosy pink and coppery orange at a couple of local nurseries, and they are great with that silvery grey foliage. Deadhead them, and they will go until the hard frost of November--really! I have photos from last year, and you may remember me extolling this plant's virtues in the past.


Obviously I have something about African daisies, or just daisies in general, because this is Osteospermum 'Astra Pink Yellow', definitely a star performer last year. I've read that some people don't like pink and yellow together, or find them problematic to match up--this plant solves that, and provides a colour combination that I found I really liked. Hopefully I'll locate this plant this year, because the cuttings I took didn't root.


I fell in love with Torenia, or wishbone flower, a couple of years ago when I saw this colour combination, so different from the usual purple-white or blue-white combinations. Maybe the wishbone doesn't show up as well--but I'm smitten with 'Yellow Moon' very much so!


Portulaca love the heat, and they will take it a bit drier than my climate gives them if planted in the ground. The solution has been to plant them out in containers; some go in a large hypertufa trough, others into terracotta containers along with annual ice plant (Mesembryanthemum) and still others get put into small black metal planters I picked up a few years ago. They bake nicely in these containers, and flower like maniacs, and I'm reminded of my mother's twin sister, my late aunt, whenever I see them, as they were a favourite flower of hers. And that's why I plant them and mollycoddle them a wee bit. This is 'Yubi Rose' at least I think it is!


While I LOVE Steve Silk's recipe for planting containers with Thrillers, Fillers & Spillers, I don't always follow that recipe, although this is a plant that I consider a thriller: Agastache, or Hummingbird Mint, in this case 'Acapulco Orange'. Everything about this plant makes me happy, from its lemon-minty scent to its floriferous, easy care nature, to the way it DOES act like a magnet for hummingbirds and other pollinators. I generally have it in rose as well as the salmony-orange, and several different companies have their own versions in shades of salmon through to magenta. This may well be perennial for others with better winter drainage or slightly less hostile winters, but I haven't overwintered it outside--so far!


Bacopas bored me until two years ago, when some savvy breeder produced a couple of cultivars with gold-green variegation in the foliage, as well as lavender flowers. This is Copia Golden Leaves, and I know I've raved about it before, but it truly was an outstanding annual, as you may remember from this first post on containers, where the snow-covered bacopa/sutera was still flowering in November. I've already sourced it for this year, and I'm not telling where--til I get mine home, of couse. Bwah hah hah!


It's been probably a decade since I first discovered lantana and was besotted with it. Not with its scent, that's for sure, which I find very unpleasant, but it sure is a butterfly magnet and does especially well in containers for me. It does need to be deadheaded, and although this is a photo of one of the Sorbet coloured types, I really like the stronger, hot-coloured ones. The problem I find is that each company has its own names for the various colours, and yet there's not always a lot of difference between the offerings of one company and another, so I get confused and forget ALL the cultivar names. Must be my age.


I was never a fan of ageratum until a couple of years ago when I discovered a deep wine coloured variety, (One was called Island Mist Magenta, but there was one with wine in the name, too. Same problem as with lantana). Then I discovered that I rarely use white in my containers, and the purity of the white ageratum really delighted me, so now I do at least one container in red and white, for the Canadian flag, or Red, white, blue and a splash of yellow, for the Acadian flag.


Don't forget foliage is a really important part of great containers, both in terms of colour and texture. Of course I've gotten fond of the brilliant sweet potato vines in their fiesta colours, and the newer coleus (despite their new genus name which sounds like sneezing) but there are a host of other intriguing plants, including Helichrysum (especially, for me, the Lime/lemon-lime types), begonias, Swedish ivies, oxalis and lysimachias. My favourite lysimachia is the deliciously named 'Walkabout Sunset', but the only photo I could find is below, with the container in the very back, full of nemesia I grew from seed and an orange callibrachoa that I loved. If time permits this week and I can find some of the missing photos (don't ask...), I'll do a second post on interesting annuals. Hopefully I'll discover some new annuals this year (or some old ones) that also make me happy. If spring ever comes, that is...

Containing yer gardening enthusiasms Part 2: Tips for Success

Last time, I promised we’d have a chat about some tips for container successes, so here we go:

Containers: You can use just about anything you want for containers, and people do! I’ve seen wonderful planters made with old shoes, tea kettles, vases, baskets, purses, as well as the dizzying array of containers that are actually designed for plants. The main thing to make sure of is that they have drainage holes. Don’t bother with the ‘layer of crushed gravel’ or other supposed helpful options for drainage: if Jeff Gillman says that this doesn’t work, that’s plenty good enough for me. A pot shard over large drainage holes will keep the soil from coming out the bottom, but that’s all I bother with. If you buy a fabulous container that is lacking drainage holes, you can either drill holes in it (with the proper drill and bit) or do what I do: plant into a slightly smaller, plastic container with drainage holes in it, and slip that into the more ornate planter. Larger containers are heavier, but they have more room for multiple plants. I'm very partial to terra cotta, and to brightly coloured, glazed pottery containers in a variety of shapes and sizes.


Soil: use the best quality potting medium you can afford. You can make up your own mediums or purchase pre-made, but one thing I don’t recommend is using garden soil. Not only is it full of weed seeds and living creatures that might not appreciate life in a container, it’s generally heavier which makes containers that much harder to move around. You can make up good potting medium using a mixture of screened compost, sand, peatmoss or peat substitute (I’m not weighing in today on the peat argument) and perlite or vermiculite.

Watering: This is definitely one of the secrets to container success: making sure that you don’t let your containers dry out. This means watering daily, in most cases, depending on the time of year and the climate. Come autumn, when the plants have slowed down growing and days are cooler, you might not have to water daily; it just depends. Grouping containers together helps to keep moisture in the containers so you might not have to water quite so often. Some gardeners recommend adding those moisture-holding crystals, but they’ve been shown not to be particularly useful, so I don’t bother with them anymore.

Fertilizing: You can mix slow release fertilizer, organic or otherwise, into your potting mixture before planting, but you’ll still need to fertilize later in the season. I usually toss bonemeal and seaweed meal into my container mixtures along with some compost, and then water with liquid seaweed fertilizer once every two weeks. When you do fertilize, make sure that you have watered the plants well before fertilizing, or you can burn your plants roots.

Plant selection and care: as hard as it is to do, the theory goes that we’re supposed to select young, healthy plants that aren’t yet blooming for our containers and gardens. The theory makes sense, of course: plants that aren’t yet blooming tend to settle in to new conditions (whether in gardens or containers) because they aren’t focusing their energy onto creating flowers and seed. But when we’re starved for colour, it’s hard not to buy the plants that are already putting up flowers, isn’t it? Well, you’ll really thank yourself if you do buy plants that aren’t yet flowering, or if you disbud those that are forming flowers. Trust me on this. Within a couple of weeks, those new plants will have settled in and be flowering nicely. This is where it helps to have a greenhouse or other place to hold your containers for a couple of weeks while you are waiting. And you can always buy or create a couple of planters already in flower, just to help you get through the early weeks. I’ve been known to do that, too.


Deadheading is vital for prolonged bloom; after all, annuals are programmed to flower, set seed, and die, so if we prevent them from setting seed, they’ll keep flowering, determined to have their progeny live on after them. While you’re deadheading, you might also remember to cut container plants back a bit every week or so to encourage a new flush of growth and keep your plants looking lush and healthy. Somewhere, someone told me to use think thirds: cut back a third of a plant to a third of its height every three weeks. I might not get the every three weeks part right, but I remember to trim plants a third at a time, and they seem to do quite well. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Next time: some tempting plants I love in containers. But first, since it's now St. Patrick's Day, at least in Nova Scotia...